Mother Cabrini monument to replace Columbus statue in Chicago's Arrigo Park
A new statue will be standing in Arrigo Park in Chicago's Little Italy neighborhood, replacing the Christopher Columbus statue that came down in 2020.
Mother Francis Xavier Cabrini will be memorialized in a new monument in the park, located at Polk and Loomis streets. The Italian-born missionary was chosen in an online voting contest launched by the Chicago Park District to replace the Columbus statue.
Cabrini received an overwhelming majority of votes in the poll, with 1,500 out of 3,900 submissions, according to the Chicago Park District.
The other candidates included Nobel Prize-winning virologist Renato Dulbecco; physicist Enrico Fermi, who created the first artificial nuclear reactor; 18th-cenutry physician and American Revolution supporter Philip Mazzei; physician and educator Maria Montessori; Chicago activist Florence Scala, who fought the encroachment of the University of Illinois Chicago campus on Little Italy; influential U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia; and explorer and Columbus contemporary Amerigo Vespucci.
The finalists were selected based on their demonstrated civic impact, historical and cultural significance, and integrity and enduring impact, according to the Park District.
Mother Cabrini was born in 1850 in a village called S'ant Angelo Lodigiano near Milan in pre-unification Italy. At the time, the area was part of the Austrian Empire.
Cabrini founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus with seven young women in 1880. She had wanted to be a missionary in China, but Pope Leo XIII told her to go "not to the East, but to the West," and she headed to the U.S. instead.
Cabrini arrived in New York City in 1889, and organized catechism and education for Italian immigrants while providing for the needs of numerous orphans, according to her missionary order. She set up schools and orphanages "despite tremendous odds," her order said.
Altogether, Cabrini founded 67 orphanages, schools, and hospitals — including two in Chicago. She became a U.S. citizen in 1909.
Mother Cabrini died at Columbus Hospital in Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood on Dec. 22, 1917, and became the first U.S. citizen to be canonized as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church in 1946.
Cabrini is the patron saint of immigrants and hospital workers.
"When Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini came to Chicago in 1899, she didn't just serve immigrant families, she built institutions that transformed lives. She founded schools, orphanages, and hospitals that cared for Italian immigrants facing hardship, and she ensured that resources flowed back into the neighborhoods that needed them most," Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said in a news release. "Her work reflects Chicago at its best: a city that rises by lifting others. This monument at Arrigo Park will honor her enduring legacy and all of the communities who continue to shape our city."
Back in 2020, then-Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot had the Columbus statue in Arrigo Park — as well as another in Grant Park and a third in South Chicago — taken down.
This came after a group of protesters clashed with police officers at the Christopher Columbus statue in Grant Park on July 17, 2020. Some of the protesters tried to wrap a rope around the statue and tear it down.
A week later, the Grant Park Columbus statue was removed, to the cheers of people who said monuments to Columbus are insults to Indigenous Americans. The Columbus statue in Arrigo Park, and another one that was part of a fountain at 92nd Street and Exchange Avenue, followed soon afterward.
For years afterward, Italian American groups in the city fought to put the Columbus statues back up. In May of last year, the Chicago Park District reached a deal to loan the former Arrigo Park statue to the Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans for a museum display.
